DNA

"DNA" is a song released earlier this year by Kendrick Lamar in the album, "Damn." Kendrick Lamar is considered one of the best rappers today, if not the best, for his excessive and interesting choice of words in each of his songs. Kendrick raps a lot about current political events, particularly the dangers of the world facing black men. Every line has a deep meaning behind it and each song in his album continues off of the last song. In DNA, much of Kendrick's lyrics refer to violence, but not violence that he wants to carry out, violence that is directed towards African-Americans by society. When Kendrick says, "You ain't shit without a body on your belt," we see Kendrick painting violence as a necessity for respect. Moreover, Kendrick goes so far as to tie violence to race when he says, "Sex, money, murder our DNA." Kendrick paints himself as being seen as as violent and aggressive by society. A great example of this is Geraldo Rivera's infamous line being sampled in the song. In the middle of the song Rivera says, "This is why I say that hip hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years." This line is meant to portray how the media sees Kendrick Lamar and the black community, specifically how Fox News views the black community. We see a lot of repetition in DNA. One occurs at the beginning of the song when Kendrick says, "I got, I got, I got, I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA." Kendrick repeatedly says, "I got" to establish that he is in fact talking about himself. We also see Kendrick use "DNA" at the end of a lot of lines. This enhances the meaning of the song because Kendrick wants to make sure that we understand that he is using the word to talk about his perspective of being a black male. We also see Kendrick use hyperbole in this song during his lyrics that say, "I was born like this, since one like this, immaculate conception, I transform like this, perform like this, was Yeshua's new weapon." Here, Kendrick exaggerates by comparing himself to Jesus Christ himself, but not in the way you would think. This line is trying to tell us that in order to fix many of the problems we face in this world we must first call on God. Lastly, we see Kendrick use an oxymoron we he says, "My expertise checked out in second grade." Expertise is the skill of an expert and most of the time it's hard to believe that someone in second grade is an expert at anything. I found this line very interesting because of that.